Yeah, I'm not sure ideas are stolen as much as iterated and improved upon. Accusing people of stealing ideas can be a pretty slippery slope... itList may have some of the same elements of digg, but didn't put it all together in the same way. I suppose this makes them similar ideas, but entirely different products.
Bigger lesson here is that first-mover isn't really worth that much if you're going to get it wrong. Act early on trends, but don't be first; let someone else make the mistakes for you.
I have first hand experience of this at my last company (as an employee). Several big name companies were sniffing around and the CEO took the initiative to actually explain in detail what we were doing and how we did it.
Not one of the companies actually became a competitor even though they had the financial resources to crush us. In fact, one ended up purchasing us!
YouTube solved a difficult problem. How to let people share videos easily. I can't imagine that converting multiple video formats to Flash Video was an easy problem to solve, either.
This brings out the whole "what is an idea worth" question again. And my stand is that it is worth next to nothing.
Take Skype, which is one of the companies mentioned in the article. No, they were not the first company ever to do voip. This, of course, begs the question: Why didn't the first movers become huge successes? After all they had a lead of around ten years.
Because of execution.
The reason skype became a success was not that they had an idea that was so awesome the money just started pouring in - it was years of hard work, good design and smartness that got them there. I know that they first tried to raise capital in Denmark, but nobody understood what the heck they were talking about, so they had to move abroad and try there. They were basically so set on the idea that they, after having been put down by almost all VC's in their own country they moved abroad to get funding. Their determination is what made them successful, it had very little to do with the idea.
They might just as well have started a filesharing network and had success with that. Oh wait... They did...
i agree with you that they may had any other idea and be determined about it, but if the idea wasn't what people needed it wouldn't have the enormous success it had.
Actually, I've often felt that "first comer advantage" is more of a DISadvantage, in all aspects of tech, not just Web2.0. I think that overall there are more historic examples of the first-comers not being the dominant market leaders. This goes all the way back to the dawn of the PC (CP/m vs, MS-DOS, VisiCalc vs. Lotus 123 vs Excel, WordPerfect vs. MS-WORD, etc.).
It is difficult and expensive to create a new product, and thus a new market. It takes a lot of time effort and energy to figure out what people want and how to deliver it. Almost every new technology startup has a 20 man-years worth of features and ideas that they just don't have time to implement. Similarly, they often have 20 man-years worth of work wasted on features that didn't get used or pan out the way expected.
Contrast this to a "second-comer" company who only has to look at what is currently working for the "first-comer" and look at what is missing that customers want (things on that 20 man-year long list of RFE's). This second-comer has a much more pinpointed goal, they know better what they want to develop and how it should look in the end. They also do not have to wait for a customer base to develop, or expend marketing dollars to create demand. Additionally they can piggy-back on the marketing dollars that the first-comer invested (Check out bar.org, it's like foo.com but without all the annoying baz).
The whole article is kind of warped by it's insistence on the word "stolen." Digg owed a lot to websites that came before it, but there was no stealing. As a matter of fact, Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us provided a lot of useful advice early on.
An idea is not an innovation. MP3 players were nothing new when the iPod came out, but the iPod was the most innovative Apple product in years, which is saying a lot at a company like Apple. The iPod remains one of the most innovative consumer electronic devices on the market.
The iPod remains one of the most innovative consumer electronic devices on the market
It seems fairly straightforward to me, and not a major change from the Walkman of the late 1970s--a device that was actually innovative, but still fairly straightforward.
